README.md

sphere-knn

sphere-knn is a Node.JS module that provides fast nearest-neighbor lookups on
a sphere. This is useful if, for example, you have a database of geographic
points (latitude, longitude) and want to swiftly look up which of those points
are near a given latitude, longitude pair. It came out of a need to do such
lookups in the Dark Sky API, but all
existing libraries either threw scary runtime flags, were too slow, broke at
the International Date Line, or didn't have tests.

So anyway, this one is well-tested and works correctly regardless of where on
the earth things are located. It's been in production use at Dark Sky since
Oct 2012.

The points array consists of objects that were in the array passed to
sphereKnn(), ordered from nearest to furthest. The maxResults value is the
maximum size of the returned array, and is mandatory. (Often, you'll just want
it set to 1, but there are use-cases for more points.) The maxDistance value
is the maximum distance away we should look up for in meters. This is handy if
you want to find, say, any points within 200 kilometers of a given point.
maxDistance is optional and defaults to Infinity. (Please note that since our
backing earth model is a sphere, all distances given to this function are
approximate. If it matters that much to you, add a few meters of padding and
check the results with some very accurate (and complex) distance function.)